


Starlight at the end of the tunnel

by Eturni



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Angst, Emotional support angel Aziraphale, Flashbacks, Gore, Hurt/Comfort, Other, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Trauma Recovery, Violence, graphic descriptions of the fall and the war in heaven
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-24
Updated: 2019-11-24
Packaged: 2021-02-17 22:13:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,367
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21550597
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eturni/pseuds/Eturni
Summary: A prompt for the OLHTS Christmas gift exchange:Crowley, occasionally, gets swept up in his thoughts about the Fall and being part of it all.Aziraphale is Emotional Support Angel about it always.
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 10
Kudos: 24
Collections: O Lord Heal This Gift Exchange





	Starlight at the end of the tunnel

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Morningstarofnight](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Morningstarofnight/gifts).



> Happy yule, merry candlenights and however else you choose to celebrate the season.
> 
> With thanks to OAbsalom for the beta from the medical and emotional perspective.
> 
> Please note the trigger warnings. _Please note the trigger warnings._ I do not have PTSD or flashbacks myself but have had input in dealing with them from the support perspective and did a lot of research on the experiences and current treatment best practice to make sure it's as accurate as possible. This means it may be upsetting to anyone who has/does go through this.
> 
> That said the ending is happy. There is comfort and Aziraphale is there but it means getting through to the other side of Crowley's memories around the fall. Enjoy!

Crowley is stalking around the trimmed up bookshop, a familiar path through the books that forms its own protective sigil by now, when something brushes up against his senses and stops him in his tracks. Aziraphale is around somewhere but it doesn’t feel like the angel is in danger. He stops and furrows his brow as he looks around, trying to figure out what the strange feeling is. Like he’s getting larger at the edges, coming out of his form. Or the shop’s getting smaller.

Yes, it _seems_ a little smaller but it’s been that way since the tree and the blessed lights went up. It doesn’t feel like anything supernatural-

He tries to lick at his lips. Slightly forked tongue _warning_ already shifting, pulling air in and across to curiously taste at the air as something in the back of his mind pounds at the walls, screaming.

His hands are raising, rubbing anxiously down arms. Then, by degrees, firmer: like brushing off too much rainwater, like rubbing off dried mud, like pressing at creatures crawling on his flesh, like forcing the sudden flesh from his corporation as if it could save him from the way it burned his _NO_

“Aziraphale?” His voice is a cracked croak as he realises; as he looks down.

A hand, hardly his own, hardly a hand, covered in the scattered heart-matter of a cherub. Gold shimmer-shine at odds with the burn. With the _smell_. Not a human scent, nothing mortal but _close_ so close too close to an orange studded with cloves. Tart, bright fruit hanging innocuously near the decorated tree and the zest-spray taste of it is in Crowley’s mouth. Like angel blood. He feels the spray of it, the stick as it settles against his skin. Orange and clove, there but not, in the roof of his mouth where his tongue flicks and scents and denies but it’s _there_ and the light is fading from the heart of the angel in front of him.

When he looks up there’s no bookshop. It’s not real, can’t be real, but he’s back in heaven before the offices, before everything went to hell. Back in heaven when everything first went to hell. When the peace of an eternity in Their light fractured and swelled and shattered a third of the host.

They’re shattering now. He can hear it. He can smell the blood and the burning. He can see the warriors, the ones he faces down and flees from and darts around.

Angels and angels and who’s on whose side but Crowley wants God. Crowley wants answers – not a war. Crowley is willing to sneak and rend and tear holes in the host that stands in his way to make it happen. There has to be a mistake somewhere. Couldn’t be Their will to turn them on each other. To leave all of them to suffer without any more meaning than the Metatron could shape for them from Their missives.

Wails, trumpets, a thunderous cacophony of righteous fury and pained disbelief drowning out even the wailing siren-song of the grace in Crowley’s chest. 

Wrong, wrong, all wrong. Can’t stop now. Where’s Lucifer? Why are so many against us? Don’t the humans deserve better? Don’t we? Come out here and answer me.

Flashes of lighting-plasma, stardust-spray and broken prism-light as angels bleed across the length of the sudden battlefield.

Angels. Siblings. Family. Crowley played with them, built with them, scattered stardust across the firmament in the shapes of their laughter and love and cradled bright, burning stars in between like freckles and dimples. Human among the ethereal, before they really knew what human would be. They’re going to let the humans hurt because they’re not them.

A flash of holy fire and someone to Crowley’s left starts to scream. Don’t stop, don’t look. Pretend you don’t know them. Don’t see. Can’t stop. Angels don’t have flesh so it doesn’t smell like the char a human would expect. Smells like the fear after biting down too hard on a tongue, like the too-cold emptiness between stars, like cloves in orange zest. It smells like the grief that will overtake him if he stops.

\- - - - - -

Aziraphale is in the room. Crowley doesn’t see. Sees only expanses of white. Only wings and enemies. Only flame-bright weapons and torn ethereal forms. He doesn’t see, can’t see, what Aziraphale does. Like this, Crowley is no demon; more a terrified, vengeful angel clawing their way through the ranks of warriors determined to do them harm. Even his gorgeous serpentine eyes seem momentarily backlit by the memory of their grace – echoes of a supernova reaching the planet millennia after it’s destruction.

Aziraphale was a warrior. He _is_ a warrior; one who chooses love and softness instead. The breath momentarily catches in his throat as he considers his options. Crowley had hurt him, before, like this. Had hurt himself, too, more than once. Clawing at his own flesh with the memory of _boiling, burning, sulphur_ causing him to tear tracks along his flesh as though he could peel it off and take the memory with it.

He isn’t tearing at his flesh now, only staring forward with wide fearful eyes and panting breaths. His eyes have a faintly glazed look, lost in his memories. Aziraphale can feel his chest tighten at the sight. He still doesn’t know what to do when Crowley’s lost in the middle of all this and he knows he’s arrived too late to prevent it, even given the slight warning the other had tried to give him.

\- - - - - - 

Crowley can feel it, his grace, pulling forwards to answers, shrinking back in fear of retribution. Fear. It didn’t exist before the battle. It’s all he can feel. All he can taste. That and anger; rage cold and deep that demands answers to questions he’s not allowed to ask. His grace is pulling itself apart. So close and Crowley wouldn’t stop, didn’t stop.

An angel in front of him. Bright holy light bleeding at the edges of his vision, somehow burning his eyes. Eyes that had stared into stars as they were birthed into the heavens in explosions.

Sharp words and grabbing hands and _you can’t stop me – you **won’t** stop me._ Screaming and trumpets and terrible battle howls.

Crowley lashes out, quick as a snake, nails scratching at a throat, killing the heavenly command, the terrible chorus of battle, the…

He blinks as the word finally registers.

“Crowley.” A pained cough, no firm righteous judgement. It’s a name that doesn’t exist now. Not yet. But it does and it must because it did and it was familiar and true.

The world shifts uncomfortably under Crowley’s feet and burning celestial eyes are replaced with soft blue. Still alight with celestial power but protective rather than aggressive. It is light above the water, pulling him up from drowning, guiding him to break the surface of the present.

“Angel, I’m sorry.” Crowley can barely grind the words out as blood coats him, a hand twitching at his side; still aching to maul and tear and make himself safe of the battle choirs around him. They’re not. If Aziraphale is here the choirs are not. Even if they are.

He pulls his claws away, barely conscious of the slight burn as thick golden ichor starts to pool at the scratches along Aziraphale’s throat: divine stardust in a corporeal facsimile of blood.

“It’s okay, I know you wouldn’t, my dear.” 

Crowley can barely hear the voice over the din of battle but he clings to it regardless, trying to spot blue eyes and a familiar face even as his memory marches on. “But I… It’s you, right?” 

There is no stopping this now. The sulphur’s coming, edge of the volcano, edge of the abyss, the last few inches before free-fall. Aziraphale has his ears, if maybe nothing else. It would be enough.

“Yes, and it always will be. Crowley, my dear, focus on me.” 

Eyes wide, pure serpentine gold and blown wide with frozen fear. Right on the edge. Screaming. Too much. _Screaming_. Blood gold and sin-black and always **screaming** and-

“Crowley. Don’t listen to them, listen to me.” Pleading but soft and another memory, a different time.

The serpent of Eden can’t tell which way is up, no sun in the void of the fall the way that Icarus had. He can tell where Aziraphale is though. His angel. Blue-white and tartan-beige close and real and overlapped with _painfearfighting **screaming**_.

His hand clenches and there is pressure there. Present-pressure made of love and wrapped in mere breakable flesh.

“Okay, so you can hear me at least, my dear.” Even with trumpets and cries and the warning whip of an emptiness at his back Crowley can hear the strain in Aziraphale’s voice. “You’re doing marvellously. I know this is terrible but you’re just wonderful with this, so brave, and I shall be right here.”

Crowley can hear the rehearsal in the words; the uncomfortable way they weigh on an immortal tongue far more used to poetry and prose than therapy. It’s grounding. It helps pull his memory in another direction – not completely to the present but closer, enough.

_You see, my dear, there’s a lot to be said for the dissociation you seem to feel at these times. Humans have become so clever with it. And of course all the literature points to_ A bellowed ultimatum. Leave. You’ve no weapon. Forsake your questions. Obey. Fight. _the best outcomes being from a kind of empathetic approach to cognitive restructuring_ He won’t. He can’t. Won’t accept silence. Ground disappearing. Fitful, fretting wings. Any minute. Cold eyes. Burning Weapon. Ozone and threat. Take it back. Obey. _with someone who cares encouraging you to face the worst of it. To work through the hard parts._ Hissing, eyes already clouding gold to yellow. _Someone who cares. A loved one, if you will._

Crowley makes his choice; makes it then in the memory anew, makes it now knowing he never could have done anything else. The angel makes a lunging strike towards him and Crowley has time to move, just enough to reach out and tear sharp new claws through the outer edges of an ethereal form. He pitches backwards but _he_ takes the first step. He always does. Always would.

Aziraphale must see something. Crowley steps back even now, the ball of his foot sliding, heel finding the bookshop floor and catching the empty air of heaven all at once. Crowley falls; and somewhere in the rush of wind, pounding heart, somewhere through the memory he feels a single, firm hand at his back.

Crowley falls and this time someone is there to catch him.

The strangled sob that comes out of him is hushed by the pressure at his back. Pain, searing and bright as being captured in a supernova as he hits the sulphur and burns and boils and **cooks**. He flinches, gasps, feeling foul boiling liquid sear his core; a taste he’ll never fully be free of after that first helpless inhale. But when his hand clenches someone is there and he is not alone.

Reality comes back in slow pieces. The pain recedes and the burning becomes the gentle warmth of an old bookshop and strong steady hands at his back and holding his own trembling, white knuckled hand.

His sight and the balance of the world shifts and he realises that he really did fall at some point. He expects to be upright but instead gravity is at his back. Gravity, the couch, and Aziraphale’s firm, steadying hand. The angel, _his angel,_ is over him, carefully not touching, not flush against him but forced near in order to keep the hand pressed to his back. Aziraphale’s worried, storm-wet eyes are flickering over his face fretfully.

He still tastes sulphur. Still smells orange and clove and ozone and blood thick in his nose. Finally, though, he can pull himself up to sitting. The moment he does Aziraphale’s arms are open and patient and Crowley falls into them without even a snarky comment.

Fingers find their way into his hair and it’s short. It’s now. Not angelic, not flowing Eden-long. It’s here and now and it’s the encompassing comfort of the only angel who matters whispering love into his ear. There’s heat prickling behind his eyes but it doesn’t come. Thankfully. The urge to let it go steps down from that same fall-high precipice at the same rate that his tripping heart starts to slow. It still feels like it will burst, like he will die this way. It always does. But it starts to slow by small inches.

“The pomander.” He finally manages, voice a croak but not shaking. Aziraphale doesn’t move from his place; banishes the offending fruit with the slightest gesture and tightens his arm around Crowley’s back.

The demon wants to fight, to flee. Even a few short months ago he would have but now Aziraphale reads the tension in his body, the shift of thought across his face. In a moment Crowley’s sunglasses are in front of him, shield offered without comment. The serpent licks his lips nervously. Wants to apologise. _I know I’m broken. I know it’s a lot. You shouldn’t have to see me like this. I could sleep. I could sleep until it stops again._

But he’s shielded and shielded and in a sanctuary better than his own bed in Mayfair. He breathes, makes a concentrated effort to relax back again. His heart stutters a step at the soft, happy noise that brings from his angel. Even in the middle of his frayed-nerves and shaking soul he would do anything to make his angel happy like that.

Aziraphale’s hand moves in slow, comforting circles at his back as they sit turned in towards one another. “Thank you, my dear.” Crowley couldn’t possibly know why Aziraphale would say that, what deserved his thanks.

Something else wells up. Not worthy. Broken. Fallen. The words make a hollow of his chest, somehow empty and too full with pain at the same time.

Again, Aziraphale is there, knowing his body and his unspoken words. The being who’s spent six millennia reading his body like a book. Two thousand studying gestures and moods because eyes weren’t available any longer. His hand squeezes Crowley’s own. “Thank you.” He repeats, an honest sadness in his eyes that’s layered over a complex kind of a thing that makes Crowley’s heart squirm in his chest. “I know it must be hard for you to be so… It makes me feel very much blessed that I’m a safe person for you to share this moment with.”

Crowley’s lips twitch at that stilted, _awful_ wording but he can’t laugh because he doesn’t know where that might lead. “Yeah.” He agrees faintly instead before swallowing around a dry mouth. “Think I could do with a drink. Got any of that shiraz left over?” He tries for nonchalant, for normal, and can hear the strain in it regardless.

Aziraphale looks at him sternly with the slightest shake of his head. Crowley can parse the meaning without the words but only scowls back in return. It’s not his best work, and he can feel it, but it feels good to at least _try_ to scowl like normal as his ornamental heart comes down from its terrified tripping.

Aziraphale had previously brought up an interesting study on problematic and binge drinking that Crowley had firmly refused to accept once he’d figured out what the angel was up to. It was problem drinking, he theorised, only when it caused a _problem._ As an occult being who could miracle away the intoxication it didn’t cause a problem. Aziraphale had been uncertain, but had acquiesced with a little more cajoling and a reminder that the terms had been coined for humans, not angels and demons. Aside from which Crowley did appear more of a social (read: with Aziraphale) drinker anyway. Well, aside from that one incident on the day of Armageddon, and if anyone had blamed Crowley for _that_ they could go hang.

Still, when Aziraphale returns it’s with a mug of hot cocoa, regardless of Crowley’s blunted scowl, and he presses its warmth into Crowley’s hands. He hadn’t realised how cold his extremities had gone until the heat of it near scalded him. He wraps his hands around tightly, long fingers clutching and pushing the pain into his palms. More real, more now, more grounding influences as Aziraphale settles in at his side and wraps an arm around as though it’s the most natural thing to do.

He presses the mug to his lips almost distractedly. It’s too hot, just a hair, but the sweetness of it over his tongue and Aziraphale’s comfortable presence at his back are enough to start shaking apart the edges he can barely keep together. Too much warmth and kindness after the screaming burn of the fall.

“Would you like to talk at all?” Aziraphale asks softly once Crowley’s faint trembling has subsided enough. “I know they say that with prolonged childhood trauma you tend to try and withdraw from-”

“It’s not childhood trauma, angel. I was ancient when it happened, we all were. Almost as old as the Word.” Crowley cuts in tiredly, hands even tighter around his mug as he stares into the liquid and wills the heat of it to burn brighter focus points against his palms.

“But we were… well, for a lack of a better term we were _innocent._ ” Aziraphale fidgets restlessly with the ring he hasn’t had the heart to give up even after all that heaven put him through. “There wasn’t… Well, I was….” He sighs, feeling all the worse when Crowley’s hand moves to rest on top of his own as though _he’s_ the one who needs comfort here. “For all of that time, for almost eternity, we had no idea of pain or harm or any of that lot. I might have been trained to fight but even I didn’t understand Crowley, not truly. How then could you have known or expected anything like what happened. We may not have been children but we were _as children._ ”

Crowley winces at the wording but doesn’t stop running his thumb distractedly over Aziraphale’s clasped hands.

“All of the change that happened to you, all the growth. It started the moment that first war did and we left the proverbial Eden ourselves. From the very first it was pain and terror for you and I…” He shakes his head. “I don’t know, truly. It’s not the same and I know it but all of that changes you. All of it counts.”

Crowley is most decidedly not looking at Aziraphale any longer. His thumb has stopped moving as well. Just as the angel is about to take the words back, to apologise for hurting more than he helped, Crowley leans in and presses himself against Aziraphale. Rests his ear against the place where a heart would be and closes his eyes to smell and listen and _feel_ something other than that fall.

Aziraphale holds him there and sits in the silence with him, gentle fingers through tousled hair. He doesn’t press the issue, knows that Crowley will have to get where he’s going in his own good time. Ironically, this is the one place in the demon’s life he isn’t pushing for too fast.

The silence wraps around them and together in the warmth of the shop it’s like an old blanket. The familiarity of six millennia doesn’t need any words to break or fill what settles between them. Aziraphale knows Crowley isn’t ready. Crowley knows Aziraphale will always be here for him. They have time and love enough to get this right.

And perhaps Aziraphale feels his shirt a little damp over the heart as they rest there. And perhaps his arms tighten just a little as he drops a kiss to the top of the other’s head. Somewhere in the back of the shop the old gramophone starts up with some carol or another and the shop fills with the smell of peppermint and cinnamon without a hint of orange or clove left over.


End file.
